10 minute read
CASH IN CLAY
Kevin Kresse is building a high-profile statue of Johnny Cash, one piece at a time.
BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON
LEVON, LOUIS, ROSETTA:
An accomplished painter, Kevin Kresse has turned in recent years to sculpting the state’s rich legacy of pioneering musicians.
On a hilltop in the Levy neighborhood of North Little Rock there’s a colossal but battered former orphanage called the St. Joseph Center, run by an order of Benedictine nuns from Fort Smith between 1907 and 1978. In one of its 80-plus rooms, Kevin Kresse has been having some lengthy conversations with Johnny Cash. Or with a 3-foot likeness of Cash, anyway. An accomplished painter-turned-sculptor who grew up only a few miles away from the St. Joseph Center, where his studio now sits, Kresse was selected by members of the Capitol Arts and Grounds Commission in 2019 to create an ambassadorial statue of The Man in Black to represent Arkansas at the National Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol Building. When all’s said and done, likely this fall, the existing marble statue of Arkansas Gov. and Sen. James Paul Clarke will be taken down after sitting in the Capitol since 1921, and in will go Kresse’s creation, an 8-foot, 1,200-pound Johnny Cash in bronze, with a Martin D-35 acoustic guitar strapped to his back and a Bible in his right hand. Or, as Kresse put it, “the thing that took him around the world, and the thing that got him through it all.”
Elsewhere in the Capitol, a statue of civil rights legend Daisy Gatson Bates will go up in place of a monument to Uriah Milton Rose, a Kentuckian who worked as a recordkeeper for the Confederacy and went on to become a prominent Arkansas attorney. Whether the tradeout was a matter of cutting ties with Confederate nostalgia depends on who you ask. Some legislators (including Clarke’s own great-great-grandson, Democratic state Sen. Clarke Tucker) cheered the move to replace the existing statues with Bates and Cash. Others proposed a statue of Walmart founder Sam Walton in lieu of Cash. Governor Hutchinson, who lauded the venture and steered efforts to raise funds for the new monuments, did not address Clarke’s and Rose’s Confederate connections upon signing the bill in April 2019. He cited instead the need “to update the statues with representatives of our more recent history.”
Kresse’s studio at St. Joseph’s is a strange sight — a tiny cube within a long room, cordoned off by sheets of white cloth hanging from the ceiling, adrift and aglow from within, thanks to a naked lightbulb atop a floor lamp Kresse positions around the sculptures to get a sense of how the light falls. There’s a case of Kroger brand soda water, a bag of trail mix and an array of sculpting tools, many of which are actually medical tools Kresse got from a cousin who’s a dentist. On the floor, a sink-sized, clay-spattered electric slow cooker warms hunks of tawny brown clay into a relaxed, pliable state. The knob has long since broken off, but Kresse knows how far to turn the remaining metal shaft to get the right temperature. His other commissions stand guard at the perimeter — busts in that same shade of brown, bearing the faces of Arkansas musicians Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Al Green, Glen Campbell, Louis Jordan. Levon Helm, drummer for The Band, is there, too; Kresse’s bust of Levon became in 2018 the centerpiece of a legacy project preserving Helm’s boyhood home in Phillips County. Despite being monochromatic, the work is full of depth and shading — quite a shift for an artist whose painting portfolio thrived on rich color.
Outside in the garden where St. Joseph holds a seasonal farmstand, Kresse’s monument to Saint Fiacre — patron saint of gardening — basks in the sun, a hint of a smile under his beard. “Also the patron saint of Parisian taxi cab drivers,” Kresse noted. “He’s a multitasker.”
Kresse didn’t visit the St. Joseph Center much as a kid, but his Catholic family ties connect him to the place, anyway. His parents met there, in fact, during the carnivals St. Joseph would hold for the local parochial schools. They’d go on to have 11 children, of whom Kresse is the second-youngest — “six older sisters,” he said, “so really I was raised by seven mothers.” His great-uncle, Matthew Kresse, had a woodworking shop in what’s now St. Joseph’s goat barn, and made much of the cleanly utilitarian cabinetry lining the walls of the communal living quarters. St. Joseph lore says Matthew signed some of the
PATINA AND
PROPORTION: At Kresse’s studio in the St. Joseph Center, the divinity is in the details. furniture he crafted, but Kresse’s never found a signature. (And he’s looked.) Where the Benedictine Sisters of St. Scholastica once prayed and cooked and shepherded orphans from one activity to another, an artist paints quietly in a rented sunlit studio, and the occasional Americorps student passes by on the way to an assignment or to grab a snack in the community kitchen. And there in the middle, rotating on a lazy Susan is Cash circa 1971, when he was doing “The Johnny Cash Show” on ABC, sporting pastel ruffled tuxedo shirts but only months away from becoming universally recognized as “The Man in Black.” When Kresse talks about the statue, he uses the pronoun “he,” not “it.”
“You shoulda heard me talking to Johnny through this whole sculpting process,” Kresse said. “I’m like, ‘Come on, buddy, help me out here.” A selfdescribed “frustrated musician” who was once roommate to beloved Little Rock band The Gunbunnies, Kresse’s taste in music ranges far and wide. Cash makes frequent appearances on Kresse’s studio playlist, but so does Steve Earle and a host of jazz musicians. When I visited, meditative classical guitar emanated softly from his cell phone in the corner. He’s cordial and perpetually gracious, answering questions like, “What does that tool do?” with patience and humor. Still, I bet he’d just as soon be sculpting than doing press coverage. When I thanked him for his time and for the tour of St. Joseph, he seemed to be grasping to justify the act of self-promotion, and uttered, “Well, you know, anonymity is the death of an artist.”
When Kresse’s finished with the miniature, he’ll separate Cash’s head, legs and torso, load the segments into his car and make the five-plus-hour drive to The Crucible Bronze Foundry in Norman, Oklahoma — a drive he’s been making for 20 years, more than once while pleading with the clay not to soften and languish in the summer heat. At the foundry, it will be scanned in 3D, enlarged and rendered by a lathe in sculptable foam. From there, Kresse grabs his sculpting tools and mends any flaws the upscaling process might reveal, and the foundry’s experts use that to create negatives of Cash’s disassembled body parts in ceramic and wax, later melting the wax out so that a gap is left in which to pour in the 2,000-degree bronze. (Insert “Ring of Fire” punchline here.) Finally, the metalworkers chip away at the ceramic exterior with hammers so that only the bronze remains, and welders put Humpty Dumpty Johnny back together again. “I never understood why bronze was so expensive,” Kresse said. “I thought they were shipping it in from Mars or something. But it is so labor-intensive. After you see the process, you kinda go, ‘Oh, I see why this is such a costly project.’ ”
Knowing what we know about Cash’s puckish sense of humor, he’d probably get a kick out of the idea of his decapitated head rolling down I-40 in Kresse’s Toyota. This is the man, after all, who picked up Shel Silverstein’s “A Boy Named Sue” and set it to music, and who damn near sparked a revolt while heckling prison guards from the stage at San Quentin State Prison in 1969. For Kresse, though, the statue’s concept draws from another Cash moment, albeit an imagined one. “The dream sequence that this is coming from, for me, was after having been to the festival in Dyess when they set the stage up next to that boyhood home. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if he was playing that festival? And hadn’t seen the house redone and refinished? And coming through the house and reliving everything and then coming out onto the porch getting ready to play and pausing and reflecting on everything. The fields. His growing up there. His losing his brother there. … So if I can have that in mind, I know whether I’m hitting the right tone.”
Yet another phase of Cash’s career, though, is the one Kresse thinks on most often, “when he was playing to a couple hundred people in Branson [Missouri]. Before Rick Rubin. That his greatest stuff was still coming, and he was still out there pitching and still doing it?! As an old fart artist, that’s very inspiring.” (Kresse just turned 60 but brims with energy and spark; chalk it up, perhaps,
‘DREAM SEQUENCE’: Based on a trove of video and photo documentation, some of which came from Cash’s daughters, Kresse’s sculpture blends the realistic and the imagined.
to his and wife Bridget’s steady routine of yoga, meditation and long walks.)
When I talked to him in late January, he was in a quandary over patina — the chemical coating applied over the bronze to achieve a particular coloration and effect. Dr. Michele Cohen, curator for the Architect of the Capitol, had just taken Kresse on a tour of the building to make plans for how the statue will be lit, and what type of stone — Arkansas stone, Kresse hopes — will cover the three-foot stainless steel pedestal on which it will be mounted. It’s a delicate balancing act; a Rodin-style black patina could be gorgeous under a skylight, but too imposing under artificial can lights. There are structural details to consider, too. The tuning pegs on Cash’s guitar, for example, will be mounted closer to the headstock of the instrument, lest any sharp protrusions cause injury when a horde of middle schoolers comes through the Capitol on a field trip tour. Other details were informed (and later given blessing) by Cash’s daughters, Rosanne and Tara; Rosanne sent Kresse a photo of Johnny’s boots for reference. I asked him when he would know that he was done sculpting. “Probably when they come take it away from me,” he said.
And when it’s installed and the project is wrapped? Likely, Kresse said, he’ll keep chiseling busts of Arkansas musicians in clay and metal until he can’t anymore. “I think Arkansas has this kind of inferiority complex mixed with this independent spirit,” he said. “After I got the commission of Levon and found out about all these visitors from all over the world coming to his doorstep and seeing that nothing was there, it just hit me. I was like, ‘OK. I’m just gonna start sculpting all these people.’ ” His dream, he said, would be to find a way to get funding from foundations, “where I can just self-fund them and then gift them to the [artists’] hometowns. Hopefully, the high-profile aspect of getting this commission might grease the skids.”
